Coleman, Beth; and Howard Goldkrand

Browse by

Our work is interdisciplinary, combining media installation, moving bodies, sculptural
objects, software programming, and political objectives. In a sense, we understand
ourselves to be making art as context providers, creating dynamic architectures out of the
materials of contemporary culture. We like to think that we can "steal time"--that is take
time out of daily routine or habitual pattern and open it up to moments of the
unaccountable, of delight, and unpredictable potential.

We often begin a project with a conceptual gesture that is then translated to form. For
instance, the Mobile Stealth Unit (sample work 1) began as an imagination of a cloud of
sound that could recast itself into shapes and rooms constructed from its own frequencies.
As a physical object (mixed media, Workman tricycle, sound cabinet, Web camera,
laptop, radio transmitter, electronics, 1999) it became a prototype for an android that
gathers and disperses abstract messages of sound and image within an urban experience.

Two concepts that continue to inform our work are "cultural alchemy" and
"electrotectural." Cultural alchemy speaks to the idea of diverse people working in
concert, while electrotectural addresses an idea of an electronic architecture. These
metaphors of recombinance and potential describe our process.

Recent Submissions

Our project, Information Portraits, is an exploration of the idea that portraiture is no longer 'still
life' but can be a form of dynamic distributed network. The Information Portrait project uses new
media as a way to ...